Five Reasons Why Instructional Coaching Is Essential in an Elementary School Setting

Tyler Jennings, Lower School Dean of Teaching and Learning

Research is conclusive that the most important factor in children’s learning is the quality of their teachers (Burroughs et al., 2019), and increasingly, substantial bodies of research demonstrate that the most effective professional development is instructional coaching (Garet et al., 2016; Gregory, 2017).

What is instructional coaching? It’s a job-embedded type of professional development in which a trained coach works one-on-one with a teacher over time to plan and teach lessons and assess student learning.

It is not surprising that this type of professional development has been proven to be more effective than others (such as workshops and conferences) (Garet, 2001; TNTP, 2015): It’s the only one that enables the professional developer to deeply know the teacher and students, work with them amidst the action of teaching and learning, and support them consistently.

For the past 20 years, many public school districts have invested intensively in coaching (Galey, 2016). Interestingly, the independent school world has not responded to the research in the same way. It is still fairly rare to find a role focused solely on teacher development in elementary divisions and even more so in secondary ones. Historically, independent schools have created organizational cultures that live up to their name: employees, including teachers, have expected a great deal of independence. But is that what’s best for our students? In Milton’s Lower School, by investing in coaching, we are investing in the power of learning together.

Our investment in coaching is based on the assumption that effective teaching is highly complex, demanding work. So if the most important factor in student learning is teacher quality, what factors into the quality of a teacher, and how does a coach work with a teacher in those zones of growth? Here are our top five:

Intentional care and love.

Profound warmth and kindness are key, but there is also much more that goes into the care and love of students. A student’s belief in their own efficacy is a prerequisite for successful learning. A student’s self-efficacy only becomes possible when a teacher creates an inclusive, equitable, and just environment; continually updates their understanding of their students so that each learner feels known; expects those learners to struggle productively with worthy tasks; and shares meaningful feedback about their successes (Hammond, 2015). That is how a great teacher says, “I see you, I believe in you, and I won’t give up on you,” without needing to say it.

Content knowledge.

Academic content and curriculum are not at all the same thing. Effective teachers use curriculum as a tool and situate it within a far more vast context of content knowledge. An analogy might be that curriculum is what shows up on a well-designed website, but content knowledge is all of the back-end coding that the average visitor doesn’t see. For instance, a second-grader doesn’t need to know how a missing addend problem relates to algebraic problems later that year, next year, and in middle school, but a teacher needs to know how algebraic thinking works holistically in order to guide that child across a continuum of increasingly sophisticated, interrelated problems. To be responsive to the learners in our classes, to be prepared to follow their lines of inquiry and their individual journey through content learning, we must know how academic concepts work and how they interconnect with and build upon one another.

Pedagogical content knowledge.

One of the things that our society at large often misunderstands about elementary education is that it involves carefully studied technique. Effective teachers possess a toolkit of many research-based teaching moves that they use in the classroom every day. These strategies support students to engage in effective dialogue with each other, prove their thinking with evidence, use specific language to communicate, visualize their thinking for others to see, generate questions that lead to inquiry for themselves and others, and much more. This is what lifts a student’s understanding to the next level as they progress through the landscape of academic content in school.

Inclusive, equitable, and just practices.

Diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) cannot live in isolated pockets of the school day; it must infuse all that we do. Sometimes when people hear the phrase “DEIJ in the math classroom,” for instance, they might envision word problems that ask students to consider the inequities embedded in redlining or to understand the unique needs of communities based on their population density. They are not wrong, and these are highly valuable tasks. But our concept of DEIJ in the classroom also has as much to do with what we say and how we say it, how we structure discussions, whose voices are lifted up, and how all of us challenge our own biases in the midst of learning in any subject.

Continuous assessment to inform teaching.

Tests and quizzes (opportunities for students to perform) are distinct from assessments (opportunities for teachers to learn about students’ learning). And summative assessments (reflections of how everyone did this year) are distinct from ongoing, formative assessments (Black & Wiliam, 1998). All have their value, but this blog post is most focused on the latter: formative assessment. When effective teachers plan a lesson, they coordinate multiple layers: Where in the landscape of content does this lesson fit, and what other concepts are related to the one in this lesson? Where are each of my students in relation to this landscape right now? How does the design of this lesson support students’ learning? And what teacher strategies will I need to use in order for each student to achieve their goals? To be able to answer these questions on a regular basis, teachers need to update their assessments of student learning all the time.